


Fade Out

by OssaCordis



Category: True Detective
Genre: Angst, Death, Depression, Drug Abuse, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Mention of Domestic Violence, Suicidal Ideation, death of a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:31:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2506223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OssaCordis/pseuds/OssaCordis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>In later years, after his own triple-shooting, he cynically sneers to his therapist, “Everyone dies alone.”</i> </p><p>Sophia haunts Rust.</p><p>Written for the TD Halloween Challenge. Please heed the tags!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fade Out

**Author's Note:**

> Original prompt can be found [here](http://thisissomehalloweenshit.tumblr.com/post/99445673541/sophia-as-an-actual-ghost-haunting-rust-maybe).

On Wednesday night, Ginger breaks the window of a vet hospital and gets away with a 10 mL vial of ketamine.

Even without the sedative blowing apart his higher and lower brain functions, time has a way of slipping away from Crash. Rust lets go without complaint and drifts through the eighth circuit of his mind. Thus, he can’t pin a time on the moment when she first appears. It’s sometime after two a.m. – but still long before sunup – in the stairwell of a Super 8 in south Houston. He doesn’t know if he’s coming or going, but she’s waiting for him. Sleepy-eyed, pink Minnie Mouse hairbrush in hand, just standing there on the landing between the first and second floors.

“What do you need, babydoll?” he asks.

She holds up her brush.

“You want me to do your hair?”

She nods.

He kneels and reaches for the brush, goes to stroke her corn-silk hair. His hand passes through empty air.

When he wakes at noon – face pressed to a filthy comforter that reeks of cigarette smoke and boots still on his feet – he doesn’t remember how he got to bed. But he remembers Sophia. And, in some way he can’t explain, he knows she wasn’t a hallucination.

* * *

He usually meets Vargas early in the morning at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s in Katy. It’s out of IC territory, so there’s a vague sense of security, seated in a sticky booth among early commuters. It also conveniently allows Vargas to avoid the embarrassment of hauling him into HPD headquarters.

The sun shivers on the horizon, late to rise this morning under a grim haze of clouds rolling in from the West. As Vargas speaks, Crash sits quiet and stoned and Rust drifts like the steam from his paper coffee cup. A sense of unreality. A state of depersonalization. It’s almost soothing. _It’s all a dream, nothing more than a dream, it’s nothing, nothing, nothing_. A tinny speaker in the ceiling pipes in an upbeat country song about heartbreak, and Rust allows himself a distant smirk as he gently floats back and settles into his heavy, strange body.

Vargas’ mouth is a thin blue line of disapproval. “Are you high right now?”

“No.” Liar. He stands, stretches, can’t quite shake the tension from his shoulders.

“Whoa, hold on, Cohle. We ain’t done here. You ain’t finished tellin’ me about Miles.”

“I’m just goin’ to the bathroom,” Rust says. Like a child that needs to ask permission, except he doesn’t wait for an answer.

It would be the perfect opportunity for Rust to sneak away. He’s done it before – not to Vargas, but to his previous handler. Then again, Vargas is almost bearable, and there’s no telling who he’d be replaced with if Rust gives him the slip. As if Rust has any authority over his own life…

He splashes water on his face from a leaky tap in the restroom, trying to rinse away a week’s worth of hell and hard living. The paper towels are out, so his face is left dripping. In the mirror, his eyes are red-rimmed from a lack of sleep that has more to do with fear than cocaine, and he looks like a stranger to himself. But that’s the point of being undercover, isn’t it?

A flicker in the corner of his eye draws his attention, and there she is: lookin’ like the rain has come crashin’ down on her parade. His heart skips a beat. He never wants her to see him like this.

“Ah. Soph. Shhh, Soph. Shhh. Don’t cry. Papa’s here.”

Her little face is flushed and screwed up tight and fat tears roll down her cheeks and drip off her chin into nothingness, and he feels like a shitty father because it’s his goddamn fault – it _has_ to be. She can’t seem to get her breath, not that she has any… nor does she have words for what troubles her, because children are not meant to know grief like this.

So, she screams.

The sound reverberates in Rust’s head, so loud and horrible that he staggers backwards into the tiled wall. His head splits with pain, he’s going to pass out any moment now… his nose starts to run and he swipes at it with the back of his hand, only to have it come away bloody.

“I’m sorry, Soph,” he whispers. “I love you. And ‘m sorry, ‘m so sorry…”

Vargas finds him, smeared in his own blood and puking behind a dumpster out back, ten minutes later.

“The fuck, Cohle? Were you _using_ just now? Lord have mercy, man…”

Vargas really has no right to speak about God.

* * *

He thinks, after a month of rehab, that he won’t see her anymore. She’ll fade, like the shivering lights that burst in front of his eyes as he paces the ward. The lights that good ol’ Doc Huynh says are just a side effect of a sick –  _recovering_ – mind. But the lights never do disappear completely, and she still appears, when she feels like it. Or when he needs her.

He sees a psychiatrist tri-weekly. And then there’s group therapy: Mondays and Wednesdays at 2 PM in a room on the fourth floor that smells of Lysol and tastes of quinine. He sits with Matt the recovering steroid freak on his left and Tina the friendly neighborhood tweaker on his right. The social worker who leads each session thoughtfully nods and bites her lip when it’s his turn to speak: just enough of a contribution to get by, not enough to draw attention. She doesn’t prompt him for more, for which he is grateful. There are things he doesn’t _know_ how to talk about – emotions he doesn’t have names for – anyway.

Sometimes, Sophia watches over him as he sleeps. He knows, because he frequently startles awake: brief, stuttering attempts at oblivion interrupted by aimless panic.

Headlights of passing cars on the highway light up the unfamiliar angles of his room as he lies in bed and tries to remember to _breathe from the diaphragm!_ _Focus on the sensation of your breath!_ The only calming thing is her presence, even though he doesn’t understand it. She seems to know – instinctually – that he needs her to behave. And when he finally relaxes into his pillow and his breathing evens out, she waves bye-bye and then is gone.

She started to wave at eight months, he remembers. Claire dutifully marked it in the keepsake baby album with a sticker shaped like a teddy bear. _First wave!_

Slowly… steadily… inevitably… he begins to realize that there are worse ways to spend eternity than as a happy child. If she is happy. He can never tell.

* * *

It takes a couple of months for her to appear for the first time in Louisiana.

At first, he thinks he’s somehow left her behind in Texas, which makes his stomach turn. She’s too small to be drifting alone between planes of existence, clinging on to life when she is not alive. Not that Rust blames her. He, too, has chosen to continue lingering – in spite of himself, in spite of his better instincts – instead of peaceably surrendering to extinction.

He and Marty catch a domestic violence case just before Christmas. It’s open-and-shut, or it should be. But Rust finds it hard to shake the case from his mind when he goes home. Sitting in the semi-dark in a folding lawn chair, paperback with a cracked spine pinioned between his knee and a cup of coffee – because he’s being _good_ now, and caffeine is an acceptable drug where alcohol is not. He can’t focus on the words, can’t stop his mind from running, running, running with the details of the case. Jeanette Brown, 22, waitress, daughter of Jim and Susan, five foot three, very slight build, contusions around left eye and over both cheekbones, a sizable laceration on right temple, someone else’s DNA under her fingernails, two gunshot wounds to the torso…

At the crime scene, he sketches every detail into his ledger, then writes autopsy notes and observations from the suspect’s statement in the margins: Daniel Bordelon, 29, unemployed, six foot one, living off the charity of his girlfriend, doesn’t deny a single damn thing the police pin on him but still sits squirrely in his seat, like a man with something to hide. Rust’s thin script crawls down the pages like a spider down a spout. A day after the confession, he can still see the words with his eyes closed, and they make him uneasy.

“We’re missing something,” he tells Marty the next day at work. His eyes are sunken into his skull with exhaustion and dehydration, but mercifully, nothing worse. “There’s something not right…” He fully expects to be dismissed with an eye roll.

But Marty nods, chews his lip. “Alright. Yeah. If you say so. Let’s take another look.”

Sophia stands firmly rooted to a small, irregular patch of dirt in the backyard of Jeanette and Dan’s decrepit split-level. Her eyes are teary and her chin wobbles. Rust bites his tongue because, suddenly, _he knows_.

“Can we get a cadaver dog out here?”

Forensics finds a very tiny body.

Rust goes home and stares down a handle of cheap whiskey that he likes to pretend he doesn’t have stowed in the back of a cupboard. Sophia screams in his head, and he backs away from the bottle. He wants it all to end. Just stop. Stop it _now_.

The next day is Christmas. He spends it in bed, chain-smoking and resenting the sound of his own heartbeat. Sophia’s birthday approaches, and he wonders if there’s any point in buying gifts for a ghost.

* * *

Happiness isn’t easy for Rust. It’s been so long, he doesn’t remember what it feels like. But there is a period of time – a few years, after the Dora Lange case – where he has Laurie, and he has Marty and Maggie, and he doesn’t mind the work. He settles for vague contentment, because it’s all he’s really capable of.

Sophia still slides past him in the corner of his eye, though, when he isn’t looking. He doesn’t forget. He just forces himself to remember less often. 

* * *

She is with him in Alaska, a constant in his life where everything else has fallen away from him. She is on fishing trawlers, and in the bars of Anchorage… later, in a cabin on the outskirts of Tanana where everyone else finally leaves him alone to collect welfare and smoke and drink and fish in peace – and, to watch time slip through his fingers. Not that he minds. Each day bleeds into the next, without change or hope of change.

Sophia would be almost twenty now. She liked animals – well, most small children do, don’t they? Petting the velvety nose of a Dallas police horse, scrambling after stray cats and birds in the yard, bopping a family friend’s tolerant Labrador on the head and giggling. Maybe she would have been in college by now. Maybe she would have been a veterinarian. Or a doctor, a lawyer, a painter, a poet, a princess… it doesn’t matter. Each scenario is as unlikely as the next.

“Say somethin’,” he says to her: the eternal infant. “C’mon, Sophia. Say _papa_.”

She smiles at him and sleepily yawns, raising both arms for him to pick her up.

He wants to yell at her. He wants to tell her she was a mistake. He wants to beg her to come back, or go away. He wants to ask why he has been singled out for this punishment, as if he’s someone special. Because he’s not. He’s just a man who has fucked up too many times to recover from, and he wants to blindly fade into obscurity. He wants to pick her up, cradle her in his arms, and then _let go_.

He walks down to the river, wades in knees-deep. Thinks about wading in further, and the numbness already spreading through him. What would it be like to be nothing? To fully embrace the pointlessness of the universe? Good, he decides. It would be good. It would be –

He goes home.  

* * *

The ground beneath Rust is solid and too real. And Marty holds him, indistinctly calling for help. He feels his body around the knife in his gut, and the rotation of Earth, and all the cosmos. He is part of everything, and everything is in him, and that is a comforting thought. He feels…

Warm. Soft. Painless. He fades in waves, the tide of his life being drawn back out.

* * *

It’s a warm spring morning, just after 9 AM. Sophia peddles her tricycle in lazy circles. Claire plants bluebonnet seeds along the sidewalk leading to the front door. He’s in the kitchen, making coffee. He’s been up all night, pursuing a string of car burglaries in Caruth Terrace.

He calls out the window, “Hun, how much sugar you want?”

She never answers.

Brakes screech, Claire screams, and he drops a full mug onto the new hardwood floor. White porcelain shards embed into his bare feet as he runs for the door. There’s a million things that could have happened, but somehow, he still doesn’t anticipate it.

“Help her!” Claire shrieks: a panicked, animal noise. “ _Help her,_ Rust!”

But he just stands there dumbly in the driveway, too stunned to move. Too shocked to go to her aid. In the end, it’s a neighbor who calls 911, and Claire herself who holds Sophia’s hand as she’s loaded into the ambulance.

In later years, after his own triple-shooting, he cynically sneers to his therapist, “Everyone dies alone.”

And yet… he wishes he wasn’t such a coward to leave his daughter lying bloody and broken in the street without the comfort of her father’s embrace.

* * *

She is there with him, waiting for him deep in the darkness, and his father is there, too. Without comprehension, without judgment or expectation, Rust reaches for them, and they reach back.

There are so many things he wants to say. _I’m sorry I wasn’t better_ , for one. _I’m sorry I was scared._ And, _I’ve missed you_ , and, _I love you_ , and, _I’m ready now. If you want, I will let go and fall into your arms and fade out with you._

He waits for Sophia to speak first. He has been waiting for a long time. But there are no words between them in the darkness. Just unbounded love, and the understanding that he is forgiven – that there was never anything to forgive in the first place.

He – unlike everyone who has ever lived and died – is not alone. And for this, he is grateful beyond measure or reason.

Without hesitation, at last, he disappears.


End file.
